to in the evolution of myth really consists, and
it marks a very definite stage which had and still has a powerful
influence on subsequent and modern thought.

We have already shown how, by the logical power of thought, this phase
in the ideal evolution of myth was reached, and we have traced it in an
inchoate form in various rude peoples, as well as in its ultimate
modification in Plato. In his writings it takes the form of a complete,
vast, and organic theory. The logical conceptions and representative
ideas, idols peculiar to the mind, which were at first involved in
fetishtic and anthropomorphic images, are now divested of their earlier
wrappings, and are classified as the intellectual ideas which they
really are, and which they have become by the innate and reflex exercise
of human thought. But on account of the faculty which ever governs our
immediate perception of internal and external things they could not in
Plato's time, nor indeed in that of many subsequent philosophers, remain
as simple intellectual signs of the process of reason. This faculty
influenced these conceptions, these psychical forms, whether particular,
specific, or general, and they became living subjects, like phenomena,
objects, shades, images in dreams, normal and abnormal hallucinations.
Thus the Ideas in Plato became, reflectively and theoretically,
_entities_ with an intrinsic existence, eternal, divine, and absolute
essences. But the fetish, the anthropomorphic idol, was not only
regarded as a living but as a causative subject; the same power was
likewise infused into the Ideas, and they were held to be causes of
particular things, of which they were the earlier and eternal type. Thus
the myth in the Platonic Ideas became scientific, but it continued to be
a myth; the substance varied, but the form was the same. The objective
phenomena of the world had first been personified, or their fanciful
images were assumed to be objective; now the world of reason was
personified, and mythology became intellectual instead of cosmic.

Those who opposed Plato's theory of ideas said that he realized
abstractions, or personified ideas; but no one, as I think, perceived
the natural process which led him to do so, nor explained the faculty by
which he was necessarily influenced. Plato's theory was only an ultimate
phase of the evolution of the vague and primitive animation of the
world, which had passed through fetishism, polytheism, and the worship
of t